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Decentralized Online Social Networks

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Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications

Abstract

Current Online social networks (OSN) are web services run on logically centralized infrastructure. Large OSN sites use content distribution networks and thus distribute some of the load by caching for performance reasons, nevertheless there is a central repository for user and application data. This centralized nature of OSNs has several drawbacks including scalability, privacy, dependence on a provider, need for being online for every transaction, and a lack of locality. There have thus been several efforts toward decentralizing OSNs while retaining the functionalities offered by centralized OSNs. A decentralized online social network (DOSN) is a distributed system for social networking with no or limited dependency on any dedicated central infrastructure. In this chapter we explore the various motivations of a decentralized approach to online social networking, discuss several concrete proposals and types of DOSN as well as challenges and opportunities associated with decentralization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.watchmouse.com/en/SPI/2008/performance_social_networking_sites.php

  2. 2.

    http://groups.yahoo.com/

  3. 3.

    www.opensocial.org

  4. 4.

    http://www.foaf-project.org/

  5. 5.

    http://www.webdav.org/

  6. 6.

    http://jena.hpl.hp.com/~afs/SPARQL-Update.html

  7. 7.

    http://www.nepomuk.org

  8. 8.

    Gnutella [12], Kazaa [27], and Bittorrent [14] are only some of the more prominent examples.

  9. 9.

    http://www.freepastry.org/

  10. 10.

    http://www.freepastry.org/PAST/default.htm

  11. 11.

    http://www.peerson.net

  12. 12.

    http://www.p2p-next.org

  13. 13.

    http://tribler.org/

  14. 14.

    http://www.pace-project.org/

  15. 15.

    http://xmpp.org

  16. 16.

    http://delicious.com/

  17. 17.

    www.gossple.fr/

  18. 18.

    http://code.google.com/p/socialcobs/

  19. 19.

    http://brdfdr.com/

  20. 20.

    http://twitter.com/

  21. 21.

    http://www.wuala.com

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Acknowledgments

Anwitaman Datta and Krzysztof Rzadca’s work was funded by ACRF Tier-1 Grant Number RG 29/09 and A*Star SERC Grant Number 072 134 0055. Le-Hung Vu is partially supported by the FP7 EU Large-scale Integrating Project OKKAM: Enabling a Web of Entities, contract number ICT-215032.

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  1. School of Computer Engineering, NTU Singapore, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Anwitaman Datta

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  1. Anwitaman Datta
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Correspondence to Anwitaman Datta .

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  1. Dept. of Comp. & Elect. Engin. and, Florida Atlantic University, Glades Road 777, Boca Raton, 33431, Florida, USA

    Borko Furht

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Datta, A., Buchegger, S., Vu, LH., Strufe, T., Rzadca, K. (2010). Decentralized Online Social Networks. In: Furht, B. (eds) Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5_17

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